Assessment of Reliability of Composite Power System Including Smart Grids

The large service interruptions of power supply in the transmission system have significant impact on modern society. The aim of the power system engineers is to prevent and mitigate such events with optimal decisions in design, planning, operation and maintenance. Due to the rapid growth in the power demand and competitive power market scenario, the transmission and distribution systems are frequently being operated under heavily loaded conditions. This tends to make failure of components more frequent in the power system necessitating large downtime to repair or replace the equipment. A majority of the service interruptions are happening due to lack of proper planning and operation of power system. Therefore, complete reliability assessment in generation, transmission and distribution systems is needed at the planning stage. The reliability assessment in smart grids is very much beneficial to the power operator and reduces the risk of grid failure due to failure of major components in power systems. This chapter is confined to composite power system reliability assessment. The composite power system combines both the generation and transmission systems’ adequacy. The generation system in the composite power system includes both conventional and renewable sources. The composite power system reliability assessment is quite difficult due to the large number of equipment, interconnected network topology and uncertainties in generation capacity. The reliability assessment concentrates mainly on the use of probabilistic states of components in generation and transmission systems to evaluate the overall reliability. This analysis will result in a cost-effective system configuration to provide continuous power supply to the consumers at reasonable cost. The reliability level of the system is measured by the defined indices. One of these indices is the probability of average power availability at load bus. This reliability assessment mainly focuses on development of methods to evaluate the probability of average power availability at load buses for a specified system configuration. This chapter discusses the two main techniques called node elimination method and modified minimal cut set method